Travellers in Space and Time

The E6 vets continue their welcome comeback with an album that pairs the usual ELO/Wings pop with dancier, looser tunes.

Math? Schmath. In early 2007, the Apples in Stereo reemerged from a long hiatus with a fine new album, New Magnetic Wonder, and a bunch of talk of the "Non-Pythagorean Musical Scale." It was something only a nerd like Apples frontman Robert Schneider could conjure: a non-traditional tuning system that, once your ears adjusted to its logic, started to make its own oddball sense. That Schneider, a scholar of form, spent his time off sitting around thinking big thoughts about pop music was a comfort, but the record belied any geek speak. The songs were pretty damn good, and that was plenty to wrap one's ears around. Three years later, and the Apples-- while still tinkering with the Non-Pythagorean stuff off and on-- have returned with a collection of tunes mostly hinging on a much much simpler equation: four on the floor.

Much of Travellers in Space and Time finds the sunshine popsters toying with a kind of slippery space-disco. Sure, it's more Leo Sayer than Donna Summer: trebly, a tad technical, still heavy on the pop-rock instrumentation rather than the genuine article. But the fact that you can sorta get down with a sumptuous-sounding, hook-forward Apples in Stereo record is a neat thing, and Schneider's sure not to flub it. His last foray into genre-hopping, the punky-pop of Velocity of Sound, seemed to represent a dearth of ideas, but he seems at home over these slinky grooves, despite a near-complete lack of precedence for this in their mammoth back catalog. "Dance Floor" and the sweeping "Hey Elevator" match huge hooks with a body-moving throb at once tightly wound and sumptuously breezy. But best of the bunch is "C.P.U.", a mutant hybrid of T. Rex crunch and "Baby Elephant Walk" that wobbles and whirrs to an unlikely groove.

Travellers isn't strictly a disco record; this being the Apples in Stereo, there's still plenty of gleaming Beatlesy pop and 70 AM gold to go around. The gooey bubblegum of "No One in the World", the sprightly "Dignified Dignitary", and the warbly vocodered blip of "Strange Solar System" are all sumptuous, a little strange, and seriously hooky. The production is lean, spacious, incandescent; the man knows how to polish a track. And he's got good taste in co-conspirators, too; Schneider's old buddy Bill Doss (Olivia Tremor Control/Sunshine Fix) joins the fold permanently here, and takes the lead on a couple of tracks; his songs, more than Schneider's, further the smooth ELO/Wings vibe of the New Magnetic Wonder tracks to good effect.

As ever, these songs aren't the deepest lyrically: Schneider's more concerned with achieving a classic sound, which results in a lot of universal sentiment that can at times border on the trite. But there's certainly no shortage of well-crafted, playful, memorable tunes here, and that-- matched with Schneider's willingness to try on a few new sounds for size-- adds up to the best Apples in Stereo record in more than a decade.